Niamh Hamill

Two quotations shape my approach to this reflection and illuminate my understanding of my role as a teacher. The first is Helen Keller’s assertion that “the highest result of education is tolerance”;[1] the second is Seamus Heaney’s belief that “the end of Art is Peace.”[2] Together, these words capture values that lie at the heart of both the humanities and my own educational philosophy.

I have been a teacher for almost forty years, and in every classroom my aim is to inspire my students as my English teacher once inspired me. To this day, I can recall her explanation of Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey,[3] that “beauteous forms” could be revisited “in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din / Of towns and cities,” to bring peace and tranquility to the weary mind. Wordsworth wrote of “something far more deeply interfused / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,” and through those lines I understood, for the first time, that to read a poem was to encounter a beautiful articulation of things I felt, or suspected, or sensed, but did not yet know how to say.

Years later, another gifted professor would not begin English literature until he had introduced the art and music of the period. He arrived with a tape recorder and rolled posters, demonstrating that beauty and joy are accessible through multiple forms, each contributing to an integrated, interdisciplinary understanding of an age.

Eventually it was I at the top of the classroom, anthology, play, or novel in hand, and thirty young faces turned towards me. They had an exam to pass, my job was to prepare them for it: predict the question, cover the material, guide them to a high grade. But as soon as our discussions began, I would be overtaken by the urge to make them fall in love with Shakespeare, or Dickens, or Friel. I wanted them to contemplate the characters, consider different perspectives, and feel the shock of a well-structured line of poetry, “catching the heart off guard and blowing it open.”[4]

As time passed, and I married, raised a family, lost a parent, witnessed trouble and peace in its many forms, I turned to poets for articulation, expression, and optimism. I became aware of the structural exclusions shaping my prescribed education and found great joy and affinity in women’s writing. I could recognise and celebrate fresh perspectives as diversity began to penetrate the old grey male canon. The world is, to borrow Louis MacNeice’s phrase, “incorrigibly plural.”[5] I have gained dividends: tolerance, peace.

I believe that the classroom remains a place of profound human possibility. To introduce students to the humanities is not simply to impart knowledge, but to offer solace, perspective, and connection, to find a way to understand themselves, to welcome the experience of others, and to live more peacefully and with greater tolerance in our chaotic and complicated world.

References
[1] Helen Keller, “The Highest Result of Education Is Tolerance,” speech delivered at the Anniversary Celebration of the Cambridge School of Education, 1934.
[2] Seamus Heaney, “The End of Art Is Peace,” in Human Chain (London: Faber and Faber, 2010).
[3] William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” in Lyrical Ballads, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1800).
[4] Seamus Heaney, “Postscript,” in The Spirit Level (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).
[5] Louis MacNeice, “Snow,” in Plant and Phantom (London: Faber and Faber, 1946).